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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Next time you sit down at the Carnegie Delicatessen, brace
yourself for what may come with your big sandwich:

A big smile.

After 75 years, the place has decided to start being nice.
It’s enough to make you ask for your money back before you start eating.

The Carnegie, which is world-famous for its morbidly obese sandwiches,
is also famous for having them hauled to your table by someone who’s crabby. But
it has a new COO, and he says that crabby is out: “That may have been cute when it
was old Jewish waiters back in the sixties, but it’s not the way it is
anymore.”

The new COO is Robert Eby, and his niceness policy is the
third in a recent series of shocks to hit the deli right in its kishkas. First,
its lifelong rival, the nearby Stage Delicatessen, closed up. Then, its 20-year
manager, Sandy Levine, stepped down. Oy.

Those two consecutive events prepared it for anything — except
this. A Jewish deli without grumpiness is like a day with sunshine.

The Carnegie has reveled in its rudeness. It knew that people
had come to expect it. Its insults were featured in a souvenir video that it
made in the nineties. In the video — called “What a Pickle!” — a crusty waitress
peppers her patrons with lines like: “You want me to smile? Did you come here
to eat or see teeth?”

The place won’t go schmaltzy, Robert says: “We’re just gonna
warm it up.” That’s reasonable when you’re getting seventeen bucks for a pastrami
sandwich. But usually it’s competition that triggers such a reversal. With the
Stage gone, you’d think that they’d let themselves get crabbier than ever.

Then again, the demise is a good reason to cheer up. The
Stage was a relentless source of crabbiness for years.

Both delis opened in 1937, but the Stage Deli made its debut
at 48th Street and Broadway. Five years later, it moved to Seventh
Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets. The Carnegie was on
Seventh Avenue between 54th and 55th streets.

The Carnegie’s founders, Izzie and Ida Orgel, sold the deli
to Max Hudes. He got the sobriquet “Carnegie Max,” but that didn’t get him the crowds.
The Stage, too, had a Max — Max Asnas — and he’d already made his Stage a star.
For over three decades, the Carnegie was relegated to second fiddle.

It stayed there till 1976, when Milton Parker and Leo
Steiner took over. Steiner hired his brother Sam to cure their own meats in the
basement. In 1979, Mimi Sheraton, in The New York Times, named the Carnegie one
of the three best places for corned beef and pastrami. She didn’t name the
Stage.

But the day the story came out, the Carnegie’s line reached to the Stage. Though they’d stocked up, the owners ran out of pastrami by 3 in
the afternoon. In a single day, they had finally eclipsed their competitor.
Mimi Sheraton had done for the Carnegie what Hugh Grant would do for Jay Leno.

Leo Steiner became the deli doyen that Max Asnas had once been.
He courted stars, catered to comics, and kept making the sandwiches bigger.
When Steiner died in 1987, Parker did his best to take over that role. In the video
he appears in a bow tie, lugging around a giant pickle.

In 1993, he brought in Sandy Levine, who had been working in
apparel but who was a natural in a deli. Sandy honed the art of abusing customers just
enough so that they enjoyed it. He had business cards that said “MBD.” It stood
for “Married Boss’s Daughter.”

The daughter is Marian Harper Levine, whose father was
Milton Parker. She is still in charge, and she admittedly has little to be
crabby about. She owns the Carnegie’s building, and she’s getting not only her
own customers but also the Stage’s. “Now they have no choice,” she observes.

The staff will still be playful, Robert says. But only to a point:
“We want to let our guests know that they’re appreciated.”

In other words, don’t expect to get that waitress in
the video, who bade her customers a touching farewell with: “You’re not paying
rent here. It’s time to go.”

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Dean Poll isn’t sure yet what he’ll do with the see-through
meat locker, but he assures you that you’ll still know Gallagher’s Steak House
when you see it.

“It will unquestionably be recognized as a restaurant that’s
eighty-five years old,” he told me yesterday. “We will certainly maintain its
heritage.”

Dean, who owns the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, has
bought Gallagher’s from Marlene Brody, the widow of Jerry Brody, its previous
rescuer. The two are holding a press conference at noon tomorrow at
Gallagher’s, a theater-district destination since it was launched by a Ziegfeld
girl.

The conference is a good idea, since a wave of reports in
October declared Gallagher’s dead, based on circumstantial evidence. As of
today, New York magazine’s online listing still said: “This venue is closed.”
This venue is not closed. And now it won’t be closed.

Dean, in fact, told me that he may not touch the place much for a
year. So you have some time to grab a last look at Gallagher’s untouched. Go now to
see the wooden revolving door, the knotty-pine walls, the log lights, and the
famous locker. You never know what’ll make it through.

“It’s not going to be a new restaurant, but it needs some
work,” Dean said. “But I’m not going to make it into a brand-new, shiny, lawyer
restaurant. You will know you’re in Gallagher’s, and you will know you’re in a
place that has connections to theater, sports, and politics.”

That sounded good not only to me but also to Marlene Brody,
whom I spoke to today. “That reassures me,” she said. “Not because I don’t want
it to change, but because when people redo things completely and just keep the
name, the place loses its soul.”

“He’s been wanting it a long time,” she said. “He tried to
buy it off me after Jerry died. … He really understands the essence of it.” She
did add, however: “The meat locker, he has to leave. It’s the only restaurant in
the world that has that. People come to take pictures of that.”

Seeing stacked raw meat when you enter a restaurant is
indeed an oddity — but not any more of an oddity than the history of the restaurant.

To start with, Gallagher had nothing to do with it. Edward
Gallagher was half of the famous vaudeville act Gallagher and Shean.
Gallagher’s was opened as a speakeasy in 1927 by his wife, Helen Gallagher, who
by that time was with her next husband, Jack Solomon, a bookie.

After repeal, Helen and Jack turned Gallagher’s into a
steakhouse. It had a lot going for it besides Helen and Jack’s friends. It was
near not only dozens of Broadway shows but the old Madison Square Garden. It
got theater and sports people along with other Ziegfeld girls and bookies.

Helen died in 1943; Jack died in 1963. He left the
restaurant to Irene Hayes, his second wife (and his second Ziegfeld girl). But
Irene was a florist and had no use for a steakhouse. She sold it to Jerry
Brody, one of the city’s great restaurant impresarios.

At the center, Marlene and Jerry.

Brody had led the creation of, among other things, The Four
Seasons, and would go on to rescue the Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant.
When he bought Gallagher’s, it was on the ropes. Three years later, Princess
Grace was hiring it to cater her summer barbecue.

Brody died in 2001, and Marlene has run it since. But she’s
81, and her heart is in her horse farm upstate. To run a restaurant, she said,
“you need money and you need youth. What I really want to do is to breed a
champion racehorse.”

So Dean finally gets Gallagher’s, with its past patrons ranging from James Cagney to Frank Sinatra to Jacqueline Onassis to Mickey Mantle. He gets the walls full of
pictures and portraits of celebrities, politicians, and racehorses. Not to
mention the big painting of patrons including the Brodys.

As we spoke, he invoked P.J. Clarke’s, the century-old bar
on Third Avenue that a decade ago was renovated but put back the way it was.
That’s his model for Gallagher’s, he said: “I don’t consider it a restaurant in
New York. I consider it part of the fabric of New York.”

New York Chronicles

About Me

For twenty years, I wrote about New York for the nation's largest newspaper chain. Now I write about New York for the nation's largest Internet. I do this because I love to explore the city and to share what I've found, except when I'm greedy about it and decide to keep it to myself.
"Vintage," of course, means old, but it also means timeless. It's my defense for covering new things that evoke old New York spirit. But I mostly cover the best places that take you back in time, whether you are revisiting a time or just now discovering it.
On the street I still feel like a tourist, and I tend to look like one, too. These are perhaps my greatest qualifications. Among my others are some of the top prizes in New York City journalism, which nobody really cares about because they're not a Pulitzer.